The Decade The Rich Won

I watched this two-part BBC documentary and thought it was very good. Never thought I would see Jeremy Corbyn, Steve Bannon and Nick Clegg in the same documentary. It’s a talking heads format with little or no narration, which I think works well here. Even with its ostensibly neutral format, it feels so anti-wealth that it could almost come from Channel 4 or the Guardian. And thank goodness for that. Of course, the problems of the rich getting richer go back much further than the last ten years, but the specificity is useful here.

My vague take on the financial crisis is that bailing out the banks was necessary. But it should have come with much, much harsher penalties for the bankers. Instead of giving them massive bonuses for taking absurd risks, the price of bailouts should have been removal of the upper echelons. Paying them ludicrous salaries “in order to attract the best people” was a complete fallacy; these were the people who caused the crisis and rewarding them makes no sense at all. It would have been far better for everyone had the likes of Fred Goodwin et al. sodded off. We should have agreed that banks were indeed (unfortunately) too big to fail, protected customer’s money, but as the price of this broken up the largest banks and made the sector boring and stable again.

I disagree with George Osbourne when he says that people make the case for investing regardless of the state of the economy, as though it necessarily means you shouldn't always invest. Yes, “austerity” works in some cases, when you’re going to take a predictable, short-term hit, and/or you do have some genuinely avoidable inefficiencies. But as a long-term political strategy it was shite. It’s self-evident that when things are going well you should invest in public resources. However, when things go badly, you still need to invest - it’s just a question of what you invest in. Obviously you can’t stimulate an economy by investing everything in, say, marmalade. That’s just never going to do much at all. But if you invest it in things people need : health, education, workplace training, infrastructure, you’ll get a trickle-up effect of a rising tide lifting all mixed metaphors. Trickle down doesn’t work because that’s not primarily where wealth is generated. Give a million to a millionaire and they’ll hoard it, give it to someone poor and they’ll spend it back into the economy. Keeping the money tied up in stocks or assets is bad.

(Look, this doesn't in any way mean that people can't have nice things. They can, in fact, have lots and lots of very nice things, and there's nothing wrong with wanting lots of stuff - sustainability notwithstanding. It's just that wanting to have literal or figurative piles of money for the sake of it, when there are people struggling to eat, for god's sake, is unarguably wrong.)

Likewise I disagree with Phil Hammond that there was no choice apart from quantitative easing. The documentary's main point is that QE caused the value of assets to increase, meaning the rich got richer without having to lift a finger. Yes, this did save the banks, but as the documentary graphically illustrates, it exacerbated the already difficult problems of social and financial inequality. And as it came with no real penalty for the banks, it didn't do anything to change the culture that led to the problem in the first place. The point made repeatedly is that enormous - staggering, horrifying - sums of money were found to fix the banks, while nothing much at all was done for ordinary people. I don't accept that that can possibly be necessary or unavoidable.

(It was also quite interesting to here how Theresa May did actually have policies to put a stop to much of this, though it's totally unclear if this would have worked. Needless to say, her marketing was useless, as nobody had a clue... mind you, for a Tory to say, "let's get a grip on the banks" would have been disbelieved by literally everyone.)

My working hypothesis is that above some threshold, the primary means of increased wealth is your existing wealth. You can't easily make £1 million starting from £10. But you can easily make another £1 million by investing some portion of an existing £10 million - the main thing you need to get super-rich is money itself. Not talent, and not even luck, but pure resources. You can't make sound investments if you haven't got anything to invest. And this certainly seems to be the case writ large here, as the rich got richer by doing exactly nothing.

All this sounds very left-wing, and I suppose it is. But I realised when they covered the Panama papers that I don’t actually care about rich people being rich much at all. To be honest I’d completely forgotten Cameron’s dodgy dealings, as per the recent post on corruption, someone doing underhand dealings isn’t really what bothers me (also, lesson for Boris, Cameron swiftly apologised and the story ended pretty quickly, but I digress). I care much more about when the rich get richer through injustice, as especially so in this case. Making assets artificially more valuable is manifestly unfair. They didn’t do anything to earn the extra wealth, it was just magically gifted them. And again, far worse was that nothing much at all was done for the poorest people who actually needed extra money.

Surely, we would have been better off if we’d either/both : (a) employed a heavy wealth tax on the richest people who were enriched further thanks to QE, (b) just directly given all these hundreds of billions of pounds to the poorest people and let them go on a wild spending spree. I am only half-joking on point (b) - this was basically what was done to rejuvenate post-war America, and it worked marvellously. I wish they had asked that to the interviewees : why wouldn't giving money to poor people have helped the economy ?

Will you please kindly fall under a bloody bus already

Over at Physicists of the Caribbean, I'm writing a lovely philosophy post about shrimp. Here, I feel compelled to write yet another rant about the disastrous state of the Tory party.

I watched yesterday's parliamentary discussion on the update from Sue Gray in its entirety. You can read the report itself here, it's a very short and easy read. If you want, you can watch the discussion here (it starts at 15:30). 

Certainly the first 30 minutes or so are well worth watching. Johnson began with a pathetic apology which did at least momentarily set the correct tone. Starmer responded with a brilliant speech - one of his best and most emotional - after which Johnson immediately returned to thuggish form. Having said that an apology wasn't enough, and that he "got it", and at least trying to appear serious, he instantly dismissed Starmer's concerns for the pain of the British public as "a tissue of nonsense". He reverted to his stupid whataboutism of saying how great Brexit is and how - outrageously - they'd got the country through covid.

I spend a good deal of the two hours actually yelling at the TV because I just don't understand the thought processes at work here. Brexit isn't a done deal, covid isn't over, and oh yes, by the way, 155,000 people and counting have died as a result. To say they "got through it" was viscerally disgusting. To nonsensically accuse Starmer of somehow having anything to do with Jimmy Saville was contemptible.

Starmer's speech was meticulous but also hard-hitting. His face after Boris' verbal diarrhoea was one of quiet fury. Sadly this wasn't a debate featuring any back-and-forth, however, so it was up to Ian Blackford to deliver an outstanding moment of political theatre. Blackford is a pompous thunderer, but a righteous and principled one, and yesterday he was on outstanding form. Refusing to back down on his statement that Prime Minister knowingly lied, he was ejected from the chamber.

This is a huge problem in British politics right now. I understand the need for rules during a debate to keep things respectful, but it isn't working. Johnson is a liar. That he is allowed to tell lies without any sort of fact-checking, and to also fat-shame Blackford the previous week, while Blackford must leave as a result of telling the truth, is extremely dangerous. It's an absurdity which desperately needs to be closed. Yes, the system has worked in the past for a remarkably long time. But it isn't working now.

This doesn't and shouldn't mean a free-for-all on accusations of lying, which would lead to instant stalemate since telling lies is considered grounds for resignation. But if you make such a claim, and are prepared to back it up, you ought to have some procedure, some kind of independent process you can instigate, which can judge your accusation. Boris is on record multiple times saying things very very clearly that he later directly contradicts. How is there any ambiguity in saying that no rules were broken in his own house and then apologising for the rules being broken ? How is there any difficulty in removing such a creature ? It's absurd. 

The remainder of the debate followed a useless pattern. There were many other fine statements and questions made from the opposition, and a few from the Tories. But Boris quickly degenerated into pure evasion, referring every question to wait for the police findings. Because again, he couldn't possibly tell you himself if he was in his own house on a certain date. After all, this is a man who claims he can't tell the difference between a work meeting and a party. Who is happy to lead a culture of boozing and partying while tens of thousands of people were dying. And he repeatedly claimed that MPs should read the report more carefully, which is ludicrous because it's not at all a difficult or complicated read. It's simple, short, and damning.

Although the mood from the Tory benches was hardly one of full-throated support, it wasn't quite as dire condemnation as you might get the impression from the BBC's live summary feed. Only a handful of Tories had any vocal criticism; the majority, sad to say, were actually trying to excuse or defend this idiot against what should be obviously fatal facts. "The Prime Minister set the rules which got us through this", one even said. Yes, but he fucking broke them, didn't he ? Don't you get it ? What's wrong with you ? And claiming that his other (dubious) achievements somehow offset the rule-breaking... don't you understand how dangerous this is ? Don't you understand that a man who feels compelled to lie, lie and lie some more about a piece of cake is an absurd choice for leader even during the most stable of political periods ?

Starmer was bang on when he said that the Tories always knew something like this could happen. What's disappointing in the extreme is that Tories are apparently prepared to put up with this. To tolerate a leader who is manifestly untrustworthy. To tie their fortunes to a man who won't hesitate to stab them in the back. To accept that a man who did indeed nearly die from covid but then persisted in breaking his own rules is likely to change his behaviour because some people are being mean to him. To accept as a serious leader someone who claims to understand the pain and anguish and then a few minutes later dismiss those very concerns as nonsense.

To put it politely, fuck the whole damn lot of you.

This isn't normal, and it's important to remember that. It's not an inevitable degeneration of politics. It's not even a failure of the system. This one is, ironically, about something the Tories claim to hold dear : individual responsibility for bad choices. Even Theresa May, wrong-headed horrible person though she was, at least in her tenureship as PM she tried to do what she thought was right. You couldn't accuse her of anything like this. You couldn't accuse her of naked power-mongering. And yet when push comes to shove, the Tories at large (not May herself, who was one of the few who spoke against Boris) have shown themselves to prefer power over principle. 

The Tories are riding a tiger. They say he's "on notice", but they've said that at least three times already, suggesting they either don't know what the phrase means, don't recognise when an an infraction has been committed, or don't really care. Just what in the world it will take for them to end this sham of a leader, I don't know. The man is a buffoon yes, but he's also a dangerous thug. He shouldn't be in charge of a paper round, let alone the country.